The workmen employed in royal tomb construction of the Egyptian New Kingdom (ca. 1539‒1077 BCE) used hieroglyphic, pictorial and abstract graphic signs when marking their property and presence, and for the creation of administrative records on ostraca. In the course of the New Kingdom, this system of identity marks developed into a complex, pseudo-written code. This chapter discusses the hybrid morphology of the marks and the way it came about. It is suggested that the morphology and use of the marks reflect the extent and nature of (semi-)literacy within the workmen’s community.

Let us begin with myths, if only to swat them down. There are the claims that systems of writing are committed to transparency and precise records of sound; that the target is the language behind such orderly marks; that readers, not viewers, matter most; and that meaning of a complex, organized sort is best communicated by phonic graphs (e.g., Sampson 1985: 27; see also Drucker 2014; Hudson 1995: 32–33, for the origin of these ideas in an “ideology of openness”). But what if the vehicle were as important as its passengers? What if embellishments mattered deeply, if hidden writing, slow to produce, slow to read, the opposite of hurried cursives, played as enduring a role as more accessible graphs? And what if meaningful marks did continuing service alongside records of spoken language? This book zeroes in on hidden writing and alternative systems of notation. It attends to writing that, by its formal intricacy, deflects attention from language. It aims at graphs or notations that target meaning by direct entrée, without passing through records of sound. What matters in these graphic systems is useable, readily accessed meaning.

INTRODUCTION

Domestic slavery was imagined as existing at Rome from the beginning – it could hardly have been otherwise with a cultural institution so deeply embedded in daily life during the historical period – and its established presence by the middle of the fifth century bc can be presumed from references to manumission and the liability of slave-owners in the Twelve Tables. However, slave labour did not become a significant phenomenon in Roman culture before the fourth century bc, when its rise in importance coincided with a decline in the institution of debt-bondage (nexum), as foreign conquests brought captive manpower to Roman territory and sent citizen colonists abroad, while displaced peasants migrated to the city in search of new means of support. From then on, if not before, agricultural slavery in Italy and, eventually, throughout most of the western empire predominated over all other categories of slave labour in importance for as long as landholding remained the cornerstone of the socio-economic system and the ideal of self-sufficiency was aspired to by the elite. Anecdotal reports in our literary sources of domestic servants in the houses of the kings, like the legendarily servile origins of the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius, reflect the conventions of foundation myth-making more surely than they do any historical reality, about which the most that can be said is that the houses of the wealthy of the regal period might seem to require staffing.